Small Area and Individual Level Predictors of Physical Activity in Urban Communities: A Multi-Level Study in Stoke on Trent, England

Reducing population physical inactivity has been declared a global public health priority. We report a detailed multi-level analysis of small area indices and individual factors as correlates of physical activity in deprived urban areas. Multi-level regression analysis was used to investigate environmental and individual correlates of physical activity. Nine individual factors were retained in the overall model, two related to individual intentions or beliefs, three to access to shops, work or fast food outlets and two to weather; age and gender being the other two. Four area level indices related to: traffic, road casualties, criminal damage and access to green space were important in explaining variation in physical activity

Conceptualizing a distributed, multi-scalar global public sphere through activist communication practices in the World Social Forum

This article contributes to debate about how to conceptualize the global public sphere. Drawing on media practice theory and ethnographic research on media activism in the World Social Forum, it shows how ‘global publics’ can be constituted through a diverse range of activist communication practices that complicate both conventional hierarchies of scale and contemporary theorizations of publics as personalized networks. It develops an understanding of the global public sphere as an emergent formation made up of multiple, interlinked publics at different scales and emphasizes the significance of collective communication spaces for actors at the margins of the global network society

The frontiers of participatory public engagement

Currently missing from critical literature on public engagement with academic research is a public-centric analysis of the wider contemporary context of developments in the field of public engagement and participation. Drawing on three differently useful strands of the existing theoretical literature on the public, this article compares a diverse sample of 100 participatory public engagement initiatives in order to first, analyse a selection of the myriad ways that the public is being constituted and supported across this contemporary field and second, identify what socio-cultural researchers might learn from these developments. Emerging from this research is a preliminary map of the field of public engagement and participation. This map highlights relationships and divergences that exist among diverse forms of practice and brings into clearer view a set of tensions between different contemporary approaches to public engagement and participation. Two ‘frontiers’ of participatory public engagement that socio-cultural researchers should attend are also identified. At the first, scholars need to be critical regarding the particular versions of the public that their preferred approach to engagement and participation supports and concerning how their specific identifications with the public relate to those being addressed across the wider field. At the second frontier, researchers need to consider the possibilities for political intervention that public engagement and participation practice could open out, both in the settings they are already working and also in the much broader, rapidly developing and increasingly complicated contemporary field of public engagement and participation that this article explores

Understanding micro-processes of community building and mutual learning on Twitter: a ‘small data’ approach

This article contributes to an emerging field of ‘small data’ research on Twitter by presenting a case study of how teachers and students at a sixth-form college in the north of England used this social media platform to help construct a ‘community of practice’ that enabled micro-processes of recognition and mutual learning. Conducted as part of a broader action research project that focused on the ‘digital story circle’ as a site of, and for, narrative exchange and knowledge production, this study takes the form of a detailed analysis of a departmental Twitter account, combining basic quantitative metrics, close reading of selected Twitter data and qualitative interviews with teachers and students. Working with (and sometimes against) Twitter's platform architecture, teachers and students constructed, through distinct patterns of use, a shared space for dialogue that facilitated community building within the department. On the whole, they were able to overcome justified anxieties about professionalism and privacy; this was achieved by building on high levels of pre-existing trust among staff and by performing that mutual trust online through personal modes of communication. Through micro-processes of recognition and a breaking down of conventional hierarchies that affirmed students' agency as knowledge producers, the departmental Twitter account enabled mutual learning beyond curriculum and classroom. The significance of such micro-processes could only have been uncovered through the detailed scrutiny that a ‘small data’ approach to Twitter, in supplement to some obvious virtues of Big Data approaches, is particularly well placed to provide

Digital citizenship? Narrative exchange and the changing terms of civic culture

This article explores the possibilities for new forms of ‘digital citizenship’ currently emerging through digitally supported processes of narrative exchange. Using Dahlgren's (Dahlgren, P. 2003. “Reconfiguring Civic Culture in the New Media Milieu.” In Media and the Restyling of Politics, edited by J. Corner, and D. Pels, 151–170. London: Sage; Dahlgren, P. 2009. Media and Political Engagement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) circuit of ‘civic culture’ as a model for exploring the interlinking preconditions for new acts of citizenship, we discuss the contrasting outcomes of research at three fieldwork sites in the North of England – educational (a sixth form college), civil society (a community reporters' network) and social (a local club). Each site provided clear evidence of the elements of Dahlgren's circuit (some depending on the intensive use of digital infrastructure, others predating it), but there were also breaks in the circuit that constrained its effectiveness. A crucial factor in each case for building a lasting circuit of civic culture (and an effective base for new forms of digital citizenship) is the role that digital infrastructure can play in extending the scale of interactions beyond the purely local

Connecting the peripheries: networks, place and scale in the World Social Forum process

Communication technologies occupy a central place in contemporary theorizations of transnational social movement networks. Not only does the Internet provide the technical infrastructure through which activists communicate and share information, increasing their capacity to introduce oppositional messages into the public realm (Castells); its network architecture is also closely linked to the organizational logic of contemporary social justice movements (Juris). While recognizing the fundamental importance of communication technologies for such movements, this article cautions against overly disembodied conceptions of transnational activist networks and highlights the need to pay attention to issues of place and scale, as well as the importance of affect in the construction of alternative global imaginaries. Through a case study of a small social forum event held in February 2010 in a poor urban community in the south of Brazil as part of the World Social Forum process, the article examines activists' use of communication technologies to construct transnational networks between different place-based actors. It shows that these practices are not simply concerned with establishing links between already existing places; the creation of networks is also inextricably bound up with particular constructions of place. By engaging in a politics that is simultaneously place-based and global in scope, these actors challenge traditional conceptions of scale as well as dominant epistemological paradigms

Digital platforms and narrative exchange: hidden constraints, emerging agency

It is well known that narrative exchange takes distinctive forms in the digital age. Less understood are the digitally based processes and infrastructures that support or constrain the wider exchange of narrative materials. This article reports on research in a UK sixth form college with ambitions to expand its students’ digital skills. Our approach was to identify the preconditions (sometimes, but often not, involving fully formed narrative agency) that might support sustained narrative exchange. We call these conditions collectively ‘proto-agency’, and explore them as a way of establishing what a ‘digital story circle’ (not just a digital story) might be: that is, how new digital platforms and resources contribute to the infrastructures for narrative exchange and wider empowerment in a complex institutional context. During our fieldwork, interesting insights into the tensions around social media emerged. Only by understanding such forms of proto-agency can we begin to asses

Constructing a digital storycircle: digital infrastructure and mutual recognition

Building on the principles of the digital storytelling movement, this article asks whether the narrative exchange within the ‘storycircles’ of storymakers created in face-to-face workshops can be further replicated by drawing on digital infrastructure in specific ways. It addresses this question by reporting on the successes and limitations of a five-stream project of funded action research with partners in north-west England that explored the contribution of digital infrastructure to processes of narrative exchange and the wider processes of mutual recognition that flow from narrative exchange. Three main dimensions of a digital storycircle are explored: multiplications, spatializations (or the building of narratives around sets of individual narratives), and habits of mutual recognition. Limitations relate to the factors of time, and levels of digital development and basic digital access